The concern of this project is the role played by phonology in the recognition of a printed word. In our studies, we examine beginning readers as well as mature readers, and we contrast young poor and good readers. In addition to English, we study the readers of three other orthographic systems (Chinese, Hebrew, and Serbo-Croatian) for two reasons: first, to learn about the breadth of reading's natural manifestations and secondly, because each of these orthographies provides a simplified model for an otherwise confounded aspect of the reading process in English. The studies we propose to undertake are directed at the mechanism by which a written word's phonology is computed from its orthographic form and used to access the reader's lexicon. In several sections, we compare good and poor readers on their use and representation of phonological information. New experimental techniques are introduced that recent work has shown to be more sensitive than those used previously. The seven subsections of Project 4 can be described by their titles, the following questions: (1) Does Phonology's Role Differ in English and Serbo-Croatian Word Recognition? (2) To What Extent is the Activation of Phonology Automatic and Prelexical? (3) Does Phonological Information Activated by Spoken Words Affect Visual Word Recognition? (4) What is the Role of Phonology in Visual Recognition of Hebrew Words? (5) What is the Role of Phonology in Visual Recognition of Chinese Words? (6)How Does Lexical Knowledge Affect Activation and Use of Phonological Information? (7) Are Articulatory Gestures the Units to which Orthography Maps?